The Valley of the Kings

We arrived to Luxor bright and early on our fourth day in Egypt, and I was still half asleep when we arrived to the train station. We met our second driver/tour guide of the trip, and drove about an hour to the Valley of the Kings. Luxor is what I pictured Cairo to look like. It is a relatively small town (pop. 250,000) and you when you get out of the hustle and bustle of the center you drive through green fields with marshes and the river Nile next to you. Further out, beyond the fields, it becomes desert. There’s a stark difference between the two landscapes and it makes it very interesting. You really realize how the Nile truly brings life to the region.

The Valley of the Kings is a mountainous (small mountains) areas about an hour outside of Luxor where 38 pharaohs are buried. When the capital was moved to Luxor, the pharaoh decided he had had enough of pyramids shouting to grave robbers “Here’s the tomb! Rob it!” and that a better idea would be to hide his tomb inside the mountain. All the pharaohs after followed suit, and thus the Valley of the Kings was born. A fact I find fairly amusing: The pyramid-shaped hotel in Las Vegas is called Luxor, but in fact there are no pyramids in Luxor! So to continue….the pharaohs wanted everything kept so secret that only the people that worked on the tomb and the high priest actually knew the location of the tombs. So sometimes they would be building a new tomb, and they would accidentally run into an old tomb. Oops! All the tombs are designed in the same format: a central corridor with little rooms to the sides where offerings would be left, an anti-chamber full of more goodies and then the room where the actual mummy was laid to rest. As soon as the new pharaoh came to power, his tomb would start to be constructed and depending on how long he was in power is how elaborate (or even complete) the tomb would be. Needless to say, the pharaoh who was in power for 40 years has a much fancier tomb than the one who was in power for 3 years. At any given time, there are about 12 tombs you can enter and they rotate them. So a tomb might be open for one year, then closed for three to give it a rest and so it doesn’t wear out from too many visitors.

The actual Valley is extremely hot and dry, and because it’s past the area that is hydrated by the Nile, there’s no trees, so it’s HOT! It kind of reminded me of a rock quarry because there’s just one central road up the middle, mountains on both sides, and literally no vegetation. A ticket into the Valley of the Kings allows you entrance to three of the tombs, and an extra ticket allows you entrance to King Tut’s tomb. The four tombs we went in (including King Tut’s) were all decorated/completed to different degrees. Because King Tut died so suddenly, his was the least elaborate, with only the mummy room decorated. And the decorations were merely painted on rather than carved into the walls like in some of the tombs. The most elaborate was that of King Ramses III, and literally every surface of every wall and ceiling was covered in carved pictures and hieroglyphics. Because these tombs were closed off from air and light, everything is still in-tact and the colors are still pretty vibrant. It is amazing that these were made thousands of years ago and we can still go in them today and see them as they were back then. No restoration, nothing. Completely original. It’s almost incomprehensible. I can’t help but wonder if by opening them to the public the Egyptian government is slowly ruining them. Even though cameras aren’t allowed, the air and some light gets in. It will probably take a long time for everything to disintegrate, but I’m sure one day there will be no more color on the walls so I’m glad I got to see it.

All the markings on the wall are deliberate, and tell some sort of story. The corridor tells the story of each pharaoh’s life, so you can see whether he was a good or bad pharaoh based on the carvings/paintings. I was wondering what kind of king would let bad things be written about him in his tomb, but we learned that the high priestess was in charge of the tomb and that the pharaoh never actually got to see it. Makes sense, because if he did he would just have all the bad things taken out and replaced with good things that weren’t necessarily the truth. The rooms off the corridor in the most elaborate and complete tomb were filled with pictures and hieroglyphics about what offering would have been in that room (there are no more objects in the tombs….they have either been raided or the objects taken out and put into museums.) The thing that’s so special about King Tut’s tomb is that his mummy is in there, so I not only saw all King Tut’s jewels and what not in the Egyptian museum, I actually saw HIM! He was pretty well preserved, and looked like you would expect an embalmed 2000 year old body to look like.